National Design That’s Hidden in Plain Sight

One sign of a powerful style is its invisibility. It is so familiar it is scarcely noticed. It is so natural, how could things be otherwise? We don’t really pay attention to the style itself. Instead we notice contrasts, variations, violations.

One of the achievements of the illuminating exhibition “The American Style,” which opens on Tuesday at the Museum of the City of New York, is that it helps make the invisible visible. With photographs of grand mansions and suburban residences; with images of high schools, apartment buildings, town halls and post offices; with examples of mass-market furniture and finely made cabinetry; with pewter candlesticks and pictorial wall murals and floor plans, the exhibition gradually helps us see what is all around us. Its subtitle defines the terrain: “Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis.”

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American Style A door by Peter Pennoyer Architects in this new show at the Museum of the City of New York.Credit
Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

Colonial Revival, we come to recognize, is latent in much of our architecture, furniture and urban design. And the show’s creators — Donald Albrecht, a curator at the museum, and Thomas Mellins, who has recently mounted the New York Public Library’s centennial exhibition — argue that this style, while strongly associated with the six decades that framed the beginning of the 20th century, is still so influential that it has become (even when rejected) “the quintessential American style.”

Architects and designers, professionally attentive to such matters, will not be surprised by that assertion or by the arguments the curators make. But many of us, only intermittently attentive, will discover, like Molière’s bourgeois gentleman, that we have been speaking “prose” all our lives — prose written in the language of this style.

But what is Colonial Revival? What effect does it have? Why has it been so powerful? When we enter the gallery, the first object we see is a mahogany-colored door within its frame, recently created by Peter Pennoyer Architects for a house in Nantucket, Mass. It is handsome, grand and, in certain respects, thoroughly familiar. But seeing it out of context, we become aware of its distinctive detail: symmetrical rectangular panels with a centered knocker; crisp, geometric framing with columns flattened into pilasters; a semi-oval fan window above, its decorative curves gently softening the door’s commanding rectitude.

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Residential revivalism: Anne Morgan House, Sutton Place, between East 57th and 58th Streets, Manhattan.Credit
Berenice Abbott/Museum of City of New York

The door is almost an abstraction of the style, drawing on some elements, stripping away others, emphasizing a commanding, classical authority. Its allusions are to the architecture of Colonial America, which was itself a kind of reduced version of Georgian English style.

There should be more analytical detail about Colonial Revival here, as in the generally helpful companion book; it would help to be patiently shown the character of that grammar, tracing its allusions and its transformations. But we begin to piece elements together ourselves in the examples on display, seeing the relatively flat facades, rectangular foundations, columned porches, paneled wood doors, shingled roofs, red brick.

We see, too, how these various elements can be used to create buildings that are both imposing and comforting, grand and quaint. A 1939 Howard Johnson’s in Queens seems to put the word colonial in quotation marks. And we look at a 1915 monograph showing the work of McKim, Mead & White, whose principals toured New England in the 1880s, learning from its colonial buildings, before becoming influential shapers of the Colonial Revival at the end of the 19th century.

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A settee by the Company of Master Craftsmen (about 1926).Credit
John Halpern/Museum of the City of New York

Photographs of George Washington High School on Audubon Avenue in Washington Heights, built in 1925, and Benjamin Franklin High School on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive in Manhattan, built in 1941, show buildings that invoke the colonial past not just with their names but also with porticos resembling pillared Greek temples, topped by cupolas meant to echo small-town churches and city halls.

They also reveal a double aspect of the style, which is one of the things that has made it so flexible. In one respect it elevates a building, invoking the classical past that the founding fathers had also looked to for inspiration; the place is meant to be imposing, worthy of allegiance and devotion. In another respect, it humbles that same building: It is not meant to overwhelm but to welcome. It turns the grand into something comfortable. The cupola and slate roofs; the swinging window shutters; the simple, whitewashed woodwork: here is the democratic side of pillared grandeur.

This allows the same grammar to be used in a wide range of homes, as shown here: Mott B. Schmidt’s 1920s design of Sutton Place mansions, or 1937 suburban boxes from Fieldston in the Bronx, or a “model kit” of a paper house based on the 1948 motion picture “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.” The style embraces both authority and intimacy, proclaiming the hopes of ordinary citizens as well as the heritage of those well established.

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The tray in a sterling silver tea and coffee service by Tiffany & Company.Credit
John Halpern/Museum of the City of New York

There is also a historical aspect to its appeal. The revival developed after the nation’s centennial celebrations in 1876, when the scars of the Civil War and the struggles of Reconstruction were salved by these allusions to an almost pastoral colonial past. Reproductions were made of early furniture. Paintings, vases and decorative plates incorporated images of Washington.

On display here is a hand-tinted photograph from the studio of Wallace Nutting, a minister who at the turn of the 20th century became something of a revival missionary, staging domestic tableaus in colonial-era homes and photographing them. The style gained another wave of energy from the renovation of Colonial Williamsburg in the 1930s, which even influenced architects of new urban developments.

The style, as the exhibition shows, eventually evolved into a national style meant “to invoke a national experience and express national values.” When the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its American Wing in 1924, its first curator, R. T. H. Halsey, said the displays of early decorative arts would counter “the influx of foreign ideas” and present traditions “invaluable in the Americanization of many of our people.”

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A sugar bowl from the same set (1915-19).Credit
John Halpern/Museum of the City of New York

The style shaped for a time, too, the buildings of New York City public schools, through which the children of immigrants would be inducted into what the exhibition describes as “aspects of the American experience and national character.”

In part, of course, as the exhibition notes, the style invokes an invented past in which history’s grittier aspects are stripped away. But invention is accompanied by enough revelation to prevent the style from becoming romantic or nostalgic. This may have also helped make Colonial Revival comfortable in the modern metropolis. It looks both forward and backward; it uses the past for its vocabulary but can also seem to anticipate modernist language with its simple lines and abstract shapes.

The style balances many opposing tensions: grandeur and democratic sentiment; aspiration and retrospection; and here, abstraction and decoration. In some respects it is strictly geometric, with its pillars and pilasters, symmetrical arrangements and broad, triangular pediments. At the same time, fan windows, broken pediments and occasional ornamentation can become fanciful, resembling some of the decorative furniture on display. It would have been helpful if the exhibition had explained a bit how the more fluid forms of the furniture relate to the more formal structures in which they were once housed.

Though this is a small exhibition, there is much to see and think about. And the show remains with you as you walk out the door. Not only does the museum offer a map in which highlights of the style can be sampled on a local walking tour, but it also devotes the final portion of the exhibition to the place where the exhibition itself is housed: the 1932 Joseph H. Freedlander building of the Museum of the City of New York. Who can leave this exhibition, look back at that building’s columns, broken pediments, fan windows and simple geometries and not begin to see what was once unseen?

“The American Style: Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis” continues through Oct. 30 at the Museum of the City of New York, Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street; (212) 534-1672, mcny.org.

A version of this review appears in print on June 14, 2011, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: National Design That’s Hidden In Plain Sight. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe